One of the ways I coped with my grief was through music. This was a playlist I creatively titled “Grief.” I created it weekend before my Dad passed and listened to it exclusively for about a month or so afterward. Then I couldn’t bring myself to listen to it anymore until just today.
https://open.spotify.com/embed/user/mariposa28/playlist/5YBkqg9FIA82TIvqrr990W
An old man said and I 100% agree …
“As for grief, you’ll find it comes in waves. When the ship is first wrecked, you’re drowning, with wreckage all around you. Everything floating around you reminds you of the beauty and the magnificence of the ship that was, and is no more. And all you can do is float. You find some piece of the wreckage and you hang on for a while. Maybe it’s some physical thing. Maybe it’s a happy memory or a photograph. Maybe it’s a person who is also floating. For a while, all you can do is float. Stay alive.
In the beginning, the waves are 100 feet tall and crash over you without mercy,” he continued. “They come 10 seconds apart and don’t even give you time to catch your breath. All you can do is hang on and float. After a while, maybe weeks, maybe months, you’ll find the waves are still 100 feet tall, but they come further apart. When they come, they still crash all over you and wipe you out. But in between, you can breathe, you can function. You never know what’s going to trigger the grief. It might be a song, a picture, a street intersection, the smell of a cup of coffee. It can be just about anything, and the wave comes crashing. But in between waves, there is life.
Somewhere down the line, and it’s different for everybody, you find that the waves are only 80 feet tall. Or 50 feet tall. And while they still come, they come further apart. You can see them coming. An anniversary, a birthday, or Christmas, or landing at O’Hare. You can see it coming, for the most part, and prepare yourself. And when it washes over you, you know that somehow you will, again, come out the other side. Soaking wet, sputtering, still hanging on to some tiny piece of the wreckage, but you’ll come out.
Take it from an old guy. The waves never stop coming, and somehow you don’t really want them to. But you learn that you’ll survive them. And other waves will come. And you’ll survive them too. If you’re lucky, you’ll have lots of scars from lots of loves. And lots of shipwrecks.”
Original post can be found here. Thanks to MK for sharing it!
Tonight I go through my Dad’s things for the first time since we packed them up a few months ago. My grief group homework assignment is to bring an object that is important to us and our loved one.
I open the bag with great anticipation that I can feel him through the smell.
I take a whiff.
It smells like cold.
What a let down. I rummage through the bag deciding on what to take. Which one do I choose? There are so many.
I ultimately decide to share with my community my father’s tie with his three favorites on it: the Three Stooges. Each of us received on when he passed. This will have to do.
Oh how I wish I could actually take him to meet them instead.
I have been thinking over the past few weeks what it is like to be actively facing your own death. While it is true that we as humans on this earth are daily walking closer to death, it is a different thing to receive the news “The treatment is no longer working.”
How much bravery this requires! To daily get up and endure pain not knowing how many days are left but that the number is quickly decreasing. This is bravery that I do not know if I have, should it be required of me.
My Dad actively walked toward death for 18 days.
18 days he got up, he took showers or was bathed, changed his clothes or had them changed, smiled, hugged, and did the best he could while his body and mind began powering off.
How in the world did he do this?
He, and others who walk this walk, are the strongest people I know.
During the time my father had cancer, my great Aunt developed colon cancer. In December of 2015 when we spent our first Christmas in the hospital with Dad, Aunt Janie came down from Erie, PA to visit him. She was the closest person to him who knew exactly what he was going through having been in it herself. I remember her encouraging him on our couch, slapping him on the leg and spurring him on in their shared journey. She and him had been very close growing up since she was only 4 years older than Dad. They had a very special relationship then, and a unique one in the last few years.
In July 2017 Aunt Janie was given the same news – “the treatment is no longer working.” She too has been actively walking toward her death. My aunt and I went to the hospital a few days after the news. Despite the anxiety it triggered in me, I knew she needed to be with family and I was glad to just be with her in her hospital room. To just be.
And now we wait. She waits.
The most brave waiting I know.
I feel anxious about my grief support group tomorrow (Tuesday) in a way that I haven’t felt in a handful of weeks. I’ve been especially avoidant of our homework for this week though it has not been able to escape my mind. Our homework was to think about our loved one and the legacy that they left behind. What were their values that we wish to continue on? What were the things that impacted us that we want to continue to have in our life?
I think the reason I am hesitant to engage with this question is because it means that I have to think about the future of my life without my father. Since he has passed I’ve really only been able to think about the past and the immediate present. This homework assignment forces me to think about the both the past and future and I don’t think I like that. I can feel the sadness welling up inside of me when I even begin to consider my Dad’s legacy, which was huge.
How in the world am I supposed to sit down and think about all of the good things about my Dad without crying? Without remembering the good and the ways he has impacted my life and others’ lives?
I think I have not felt as sad as I had been the past few months and so to reenter that sadness seems daunting. But again I can feel it inside of me and it needs to come out.
We’ve talked a handful of times at my grief support group about a “grief appointment.” It is a time where one allows themselves to fully enter into the grief whatever that might look like be it crying, journaling, painting, thinking and just being sad. So perhaps this is my current grief appointment that I need to lean into.
But I don’t want to.
I need to think of something to say tomorrow night. My guess is that I will cry and my guess is that I will extrovert these same thoughts to my peers. All of these things are good.
Thinking about my father and his legacy forces me to grieve in a way that I don’t think I have yet. I suppose I’ll enter in …
We played Christmas music during my Dad’s viewing at the funeral home. We thought it suited him well. We even had a Christmas tree on display. My Dad LOVED Christmas. I
mean LOVED LOVED it and he brought that joy and wonder to our family each year.
This year will be different.
I wrote in my last post how I was feeling like my grief was changing shape. I made a full rotation, if you will, Though despite this movement, I am feeling anxious about this next season.
In the next 3 or so months my family and I will experience a lot of really meaningful, significant and painful “firsts.”
10/21 – First wedding anniversary without Dad
11/5 – First Grandchild’s baptism without Dad
11/23 – First Thanksgiving without Dad
11/28 – First Dad’s birthday without Dad
12/12 – First Adam’s (BIL) birthday without Dad and 1 year anniversary of my Grandma Donna (Dad’s mom) passing
12/25 – First Christmas without Dad
12/30 – First Mom’s birthday without Dad
12/31 – First New Year’s without Dad
1/4 – First Natalie birthday without Dad
1/21 – First Charlie birthday without Dad
Then before you know it, it will be 3-6-18.
The worst one of all.
I am not quite sure how to prepare for all of this. I guess naming it helps. I can already feel the tightness in my chest when I think about these days and my Dad’s absence. They are not going to be easy by any means.
Together, as we already have, we’ll make it day by day.
Things are changing. I can feel it.
Week 4 (10/3) began by us sharing a grief quote that had been meaningful to us. I shared one that I posted on my blog before – about how we can’t live with the memories and can’t live without them. When I made that original post I couldn’t live with the memories. They were too raw. The sadness was deafening. However, when I shared it this time I felt like I couldn’t live without them. This change feels significant.
Our work this week included selecting 5 emotions to describe ourselves at this point. We were given the good ole feelings wheel and a few other charts to help. I was kinda stuck. What was I feeling? I am a fairly self-aware person so I was confused.
I tried to cheat the system and choose words that weren’t necessarily emotions. I selected:
What do you notice about those words? None of them (maybe besides one) fit in the sadness category. Huh? What is not on this list are words like sorrowful, gloomy, depressed.
When I noticed this at group, two things happened. First, I felt a spark of hope inside of me. Am I moving to a new stage? Second, fear. Oh no, if I am not sad, what does that mean about me and my Dad? Does it mean I am “over it”? That it is okay? Uh oh. Also, what about all of the important anniversaries, birthdays and holidays that my Dad loved that are coming up? Will I not just tumble back into the pit of darkness?
Once our words were selected, we were invited to place those emotions on the various parts of the body where we are experiencing them and to choose colors which symbolized those emotions. Here’s my drawing:
The one thing I want to say about this, that really isn’t connected to my words is that I drew a lantern in my hand. I feel like there is more light in my darkness than before. It is no longer pitch black. There is light. Small, but there is light.
We were asked to share our drawings and words and as I shared, I felt hopeful. I confessed my fear to the group, about turning this corner. What does it mean about me? Grief? My dad? What about Christmas?
The facilitator gave a me a helpful analogy. She compared grief to a funnel vs. turning a 
90 degree corner. I imagined it as one of the donation collecting devices where you place a coin in and it spins and spins until it hits the bottom. It seems that my grief has made one rotation around the top and is coming back upon the place where it started, but not exactly that same place. It will again pass the place it began, but will not cover the exact same track. It has moved every so slightly. This was encouraging to me. I might repeat some of the same emotions again but in a different way and for a different reason and perhaps in a different intensity. Either way, it is an okay thing to happen.
Things are changing.
I feel good.
Last Tuesday, 9/19, was week 2 of 8 of my grief support group at Cornerstone of Hope. I was still just as excited as the first week. Finally, a group of people like me!!!
Week 1 was incredibly emotional despite being more about grief itself vs. our loved ones. This week however was all about our loved one. Our homework was to bring a favorite photo of the person and a few words to share about that person. 
We began by passing around the photos and sharing the words. There was so much joy in the room as people shared what they loved best about their person. It was nice to give names and identification of how you were connected to the person. So many smiles as we remembered why we loved the person we lost.
After we shared that, we turned a new direction. Each person was asked to write 2 things.
I felt so loved and respected by the first question. It is not a question I have been asked, except by maybe 2 people. I really enjoyed getting a chance to share, what have now become, the “last moments.” And my last moments were filled to the brim with fear, anxiety, and sorrow.
My sharing was more emotional than I thought it would be but my memories were crystal clear. Every single thing about that Sunday, even that weekend, is seared into my brain. Such heavy moments to recall, but so refreshing to say them out loud to those who could handle them. To those who, just like me, have those “last moments” themselves and know how shocking yet precious they are to us.
Afterward I felt exhausted. The next few days I was tired too. It was an extremely full week. We were advised by our facilitator to pay attention to ourselves and do some self care. I don’t think I did that well but I was able to make it through the week.
I am so grateful for this group. Our homework for week 3 is to come ready to describe:
Looking forward to it!
A Grief Deserved 